The best smart displays for keeping in touch

Being able to host video calls with your friends and family is more important now than ever, but having people holding and crowding around a monitor, phone or tablet isn't always the best solution. If you want a dedicated gadget and a fixed spot in your home for making and receiving video calls, your best bet is a smart display.

The most polished and accessible smart display for video calls is Facebook's Portal. Starting at $199 it comes in a range of sizes — including a tiny one you attach to your TV — and is straightforward to set up and use; you just log in with your Facebook details and it becomes a terminal for video calls with your Facebook or WhatsApp contacts.

Facebook's Portal is a smart display designed almost exclusively for video calls.

I mailed one to my generally tech-averse parents in the bush and they got it sorted easily.

Video and audio fidelity is great, with the microphone limiting background noise and boosting your voice so you don't have to sit close to it for your friends to hear. Meanwhile the wide angle camera lens automatically pans and zooms to fit in all the faces it can see.

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Portal interfaces with the Messenger and WhatsApp apps a lot of people already use, so you don't have to convince your friends to get on something new.

If they don't have a Portal, the call just goes through to their app or PC (if they're logged in to Facebook). Likewise any calls you get from those platforms will come through to your Portal.

The Echo Show 5 is Amazon's smallest and least expensive smart display. Show also comes in 8- and 10-inch sizes.

Of course the downside here is also Facebook. The company doesn't have a great track record when it comes to respecting privacy, so even though there's a switch to turn the mic off and cover the camera it might not be a choice you're comfortable with.

A good alternative could be Amazon's Echo Show, starting at $129. You can call other Echos directly, but if you log in with a Microsoft account you can also use Skype to easily call people on their phones or PCs.

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Google's $349 Nest Hub Max is the best smart display overall, combining the usefulness of the Google Assistant with great speakers for music and a big screen for reading recipes in the kitchen or, of course, making video calls.

The auto-panning camera and far-field mics rival the quality you get on the Portal, but the main limiting factor here is that Hub Max is locked to Google's scarcely used Duo service. To make calls, you'll need to get your contacts to download the free Duo app to their phones or open the Duo website on a computer.